This application claims the priorities of Korean Patent Application No. 2003-55875, filed on Aug. 12, 2003, and Korean Patent Application No. 2003-75806, filed on Oct. 29, 2003, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosures of which are incorporated herein in their entireties by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods of driving discharge display panels, and more particularly, to driving methods which include a plurality of sub-fields in a unit frame and perform gradation display through time-division driving.
2. Description of the Related Art
A typical discharge display panel, such as a plasma display panel, is usually configured to have a three-electrode surface discharge structure. Front and rear substrates, usually glass substrates, are provided. A number of address (A) electrodes are formed in parallel on one of the two substrates, and parallel scan (Y) and sustain (X) electrodes are formed in a direction perpendicular to that of the address electrodes on another substrate. Partition walls are formed, for example, on the substrate with the address electrodes, to divide the panel into a number of individual discharge cells. Phosphors are provided between the partition walls. The space between the two substrates is filled with a plasma-generating gas. Discharges between the electrodes generate plasma, the phosphor is excited by the ultraviolet radiation of the plasma, and the discharge cell is thus caused to illuminate.
Plasma panels such as those described above are driven so that particular discharge cells are illuminated in order to display an image. Most driving methods employ, sequentially, a resetting step, an addressing step, and a display-sustain step in each unit sub-field. The resetting step is performed to uniformly distribute electric charges in all display cells. The addressing step is performed to create a desired wall voltage in selected cells to display an image. The display-sustain step is performed to apply a predetermined alternating-current voltage to all the X and Y electrode-line pairs so that the selected display cells with the desired wall voltage applied in the addressing step are caused to have display-sustain discharge.
One conventional driving method that is performed is the address-display separation driving method. In the address-display separation driving method, the addressing period and the display-sustain period in each of the sub-fields of a unit frame are separated from each other. In other words, in address-display separation driving, all of the discharge cells are addressed before any of them are discharged. Therefore, there is a relatively long latent period between addressing and discharge, during which wall charges in the display cells may be scattered, which may deteriorate the accuracy of the display-sustain discharges that begin when the addressing period is complete.